What is contemplative computing?

Contemplative computing may sound like an oxymoron, but it's really quite simple. It's about how to use information technologies and social media so they're not endlessly distracting and demanding, but instead help us be more mindful, focused and creative.

About Alex Soojung-Kim Pang

I write about people, technology, and the worlds they make.

My book on contemplative computing, The Distraction Addiction, was published by Little, Brown and Company in 2013. (It's been translated into Dutch (as Verslaafd aan afleiding) and Spanish (as Enamorados de la Distracción); Russian, Chinese and Korean translations are in the works.)

My next book, Rest: Why Working Less Gets More Done, is under contract with Basic Books. Until it's out, you can follow my thinking about deliberate rest, creativity, and productivity on the project Web site.

Jurgenson is making two important arguments. First (as Wortham summarizes), is that claim that

despite what we may think... despite our best efforts, we are never fully disconnected. That paradigm simply doesn’t exist anymore; the impact of technology is far too deep. We’ve gazed into the abyss long enough that its begun to gaze back.

Second, as Jurgenson argues in a recent essay on "the IRL fetish," we treat going offline as some kind of exotic treat, a sign of how plugged-in we are:

Many of us, indeed, have always been quite happy to occasionally log off and appreciate stretches of boredom or ponder printed books — even though books themselves were regarded as a deleterious distraction as they became more prevalent. But our immense self-satisfaction in disconnection is new. How proud of ourselves we are for fighting against the long reach of mobile and social technologies! One of our new hobbies is patting ourselves on the back by demonstrating how much we don’t go on Facebook. People boast about not having a profile. We have started to congratulate ourselves for keeping our phones in our pockets and fetishizing the offline as something more real to be nostalgic for. While the offline is said to be increasingly difficult to access, it is simultaneously easily obtained — if, of course, you are the “right” type of person.

Here's what wrong with this argument.

First, it conflates the technological meanings of "online" and "offline," and the social or enacted meanings of the terms. When "the IRL fetish" talks about online, it means both a collection of behaviors and a set of technologies; Wortham, in contrast, sees online as something you do, not something that is layered into the folds of reality. Jurgenson's essay starts from the premise that online is simply a hardware category, an inescapable feature of the physical (or hybrid physical/digital) world. Claiming that you're "offline" is as laughable as claiming that you've escaped gravity by jumping on a trampoline.

Wortham, and everyone else who experiments with digital sabbaths, treats online and offline as activities, as verbs rather than nouns, as psychological states, and as things they can choose. For her, being offline is something you do. Online is the pressure to keep with, to pay attention to the connection, to tweet and Like; offline is relief from all those pressures.

Second, "the IRL fetish" argument turns "logic"-- the logic of the machine, of ideologies, of unthinking everyday practices-- into inevitability. Like the prison-house of language, we're now so wrapped up in the logic of the network that we can't see how it affects us (not without superhuman effort, anyway).

In contrast, for Wortham and digital sabbatarians, going offline is an assertion of your ability-- despite the best efforts of companies to produce addictive, dopamine squirt-generating experiences that keep you hooked to your devices and allow them to turn your attention into a commodity-- to direct the contents of your consciousness, as William James put it. It's a declaration that, all efforts to convince us otherwise, we still have choices and agency in our high-tech world. And it's a recognition of the pleasures that come from rediscovering and using that choice.

Finally, the claim that going offline is merely a fetishized commodity that advertises how special you are-- like a homemade Martha Stewart-inspired centerpiece, or a plate of gluten-free treats brought to the kids' soccer game, or an ecotourist vacation to a Central American resort run by indigenous peoples-- doesn't appreciate what people are trying to do when they go offline.

I've spent a lot of time interviewing digital Sabbatarians for my book, and for the ones who do it regularly, it's not just about "unplugging." It's not simple an absence, and they're often kind of reluctant to talk about it. As one person put it, "You don't need to tell people you're going offline, because that gives them a chance to object." (The big exception is writers, who are-- guess what?-- writing about it. Because this is what writers do.) Instead, for them it's a chance to enjoy the pleasure of making the choice to be offline; to engage deeply with things in a way that's hard to do in the rapid-response, real-time, surf-and-jump world of online life; and ultimately to step into an alternate kind of time, an alternate experience of time.

To me, the best description of that time is in an unexpected place: Abraham Heschel's wonderful 1951 book The Sabbath: Its Meaning for Modern Man. The Sabbath is a reflection on the meaning and value of the Sabbath; it doesn't concern itself with how to observe the Sabbath, but with the deepest meaning of the day. It's a jewel, small, multifaceted and brilliant, and one of the foundations of Heschel's reputation as one of the twentieth century's most prominent Jewish theologians.

Heschel argues that the Sabbath contains some radical ideas. It's radically egalitarian: everyone, including servants and the poor—and even beasts of burden—have the right to enjoy the day. Ancient religions organized themselves around sacred places: gods were local creatures who lived in groves or forests or mountains, and priests could identify a specific site as the center of creation. The Sabbath, in contrast, declares that time is sacred, not place: in the account of Genesis, the world is "good," but only the Sabbath day is "holy." In contrast to place-based religions, Heschel concludes, Judaism "is a religion of time aiming at the sanctification of time," and the Bible encourages readers to recognize that "every hour is unique and the only one given at a moment, exclusive and endlessly precious."

All time is special, but foremost in Judaism's "architecture of time," the pinnacle of its rituals and commemorations, is the Sabbath. "The meaning of the Sabbath is to celebrate time," he says, and even among Jewish rituals it is uniquely focused on giving practitioners a taste of the holy and eternal. The timing of most events in the Jewish calendar are set by nature or history, but the Sabbath's rhythm isn't tied to the lunar cycle or seasons. Rather, it mimics the cycle of Creation itself, and that rhythm exhorts believers to see time and space the way God made them. In this way, "the essence of the Sabbath is completely detached from the world of space." The Sabbath offers an opportunity to "become attuned to holiness in time," by building a "palace in time… made of soul, of joy and rectitude… a reminder of adjacency to eternity."

Heschel's ideas about time, renewal, and the relationship of the Sabbath to normal life, can help us unlock the real value of digital Sabbaths.

The central vision of the Sabbath as explicitly standing outside normal time, as a standing invitation us to experience a completely different sort of time, is as useful as ever. In ways that Heschel did not predict but would have appreciated, today's digital devices and virtual spaces create a terribly intimate "tyranny of things." We labor as people always have, "for the sake of things." But, Heschel continues, "possessions become the symbols of our repressions, jubilees of frustrations.... Things, when magnified, are forgeries of happiness, they are a threat to our very lives." Sound familiar?

Today, we live surrounded with objects that demand constant attention, and we conduct our everyday work and social lives through technologies that are used to compress our experience of time, to replace the rhythms of days and bodily metabolisms with the 24/7 "real time" of networks and markets. Sixty years later, Heschel's warning that "we are more harassed than supported by the Frankensteins of spatial things" seems truer than ever, now that those Frankensteins have begun to demand their creators' attention and love.

What Heschel offers is a day in which it's all right to step away from all of that. For one day a week, it's all right to "collect rather than to dissipate time," to "mend our scattered lives." Heschel's Sabbath is a counterbalance against modern "technical civilization," a way "to work with things of space but to be in love with eternity."

Finally, for Heschel the Sabbath isn't just a day of "rest," in the sense of mindless leisure or diversion. The seventh day was not the end of creation, but its culmination: it was the day when God created happiness and tranquility, finished creation, and perfected the universe.

Consequently, Heschel argues, we're obliged to recreate that happiness and tranquility. Further, he warns, "rest without spirit [is] the source of depravity. In other words, Sabbath rest is not a passive thing, but an active one. Avoiding work, for Heschel, did not mean being inactive. It meant avoiding the kinds of economic, "productive" busyness that occupied us for the other six days of the week, in order to create a space in which one could do other, more important things, and do them well. "Labor is a craft," he says, "but perfect rest is an art. To attain a degree of excellence in art, one must accept its discipline, one must adjure slothfulness." Heschel wasn't advocating passive rest, in other words, but restoration.

People who have practiced digital Sabbaths for a long time use it to rebuild themselves, to reengage with friends, to relearn and exercise treasured pre-digital abilities, to do whatever they feel reconnects them with the real world. Turning off the million little requests and interactions that cascade into distraction and exhaustion is good, but trying to recover your mind by just unplugging is like trying to fix a building by abandoning it. The digital Sabbath not just defined by what you turn off and ignore, but by how you respect and use the silence. It is, to borrow Heschel's description of the Jewish Sabbath, "the silence of abstaining from noisy acts."

This is where digital Sabbatarians are headed. They intuit that behind the language of disconnection lies an opportunity to do something very profound: to mend our relationship with time, to learn how to collect rather than dissipate time, to experience a more majestic, mystical time-- one that lengthens your capacity for attention, your appreciation of presence, and your ability to make meaning in life.

But you can't do that if you believe that there is no longer any such thing as different forms of time; if you don't believe that some of those kinds of time can provide a refuge from busyness and networks; or that you still have a choice about when and how to step outside and offline.

Add New York Times reporter Jenna Wortham to the list of people who've discovered (and written about, which seems to be the inevitable step following) the pleasures of disconnecting:

One side effect of living an always-on digital life is the tension, along with the thrill, that can arise from being able to peep into people’s worlds at any moment and comparing their lives with yours. This tension may be inevitable at times, but it’s not inescapable. It’s possible to move beyond the angst that social media can provoke — and to be glad that we’ve done so.

I would add that beyond the good that comes of relieving the tension to live perpetually in "real time" (and there is no more artificial thing than "real time"), that there are constructive things you can do with this time. It's not just the absence of tweets and updates and the knowledge that someone in your network is running a marathon, or watching a kid graduate, or in line to see Taylor Swift; it's an opportunity to rediscover a form of time, and a way of experiencing time, that is very different-- less frantic and demanding, obviously, but also one that lets you be more thoughtful and attentive.

Earlier this month, I attended a concert by jazz trumpeter Terence Blanchard, who is something of a legend. Yet his twilight performance in a Los Gatos park turned out to be one of the strangest events I've attended in my nearly 10 years as a music reviewer -- almost no one appeared to be listening.

The man to my left stared at his iPhone, idly flipping through his Twitter feed as Blanchard played his heart out on "Autumn Leaves." The woman in front of me -- when she wasn't fishing through a bag of goodies from Whole Foods -- also spent much time flipping through Twitter.

I would guess there were about 1,000 people packed into the little park, almost all of them immersed in conversation, sipping chilled wine or gazing at their smartphones, monitoring their email and Twitter accounts.

As the crowd relegated Blanchard and his band to background entertainment, I felt as if I were witnessing the downfall of civilization -- the triumph of mindless technology over art.

So far, so good.

But here is the worst part: I was tweeting. Every 15 minutes or so, I was fashioning a news burst of 140 characters (maximum; that's the rule), describing the music and the event to my followers on Twitter.

Part of me was wracked with guilt. I'm a lifelong jazz fanatic, and I believe that music deserves full attention and emotional commitment. Still, I had my professional obligation to tweet; we've entered a new digital age in journalism, with newspapers reaching out to new audiences via social media.

Okay, let's take a break and review. My first thought here was, yes, we are witnessing the downfall of civilization, in the form of the people who should be paying the most attention to a concert self-distracting themselves, and implicitly giving others permission to do so.

I don't want to just declare that live tweeting is always mind-numbing for the author, distracting to neighbors, and insulting to a performer. Let's leave aside slow, boring events that leave lots of time for checking email, going to the bathroom, running some chores, etc. (I'm looking at you, golf and professional cycling); let's focus on events that are supposed to require a viewer's full attention, like a musical performance. Can you tweet in a way that improves the experience?

If criticism has any purpose in today's crowdsourced five-star "Like" world, it isn't to instruct the rest of us about what to think about books or records or performances. Critics show us how to listen critically, to read critically, to look critically. (Anyone who still has their dog-eared copies of Adler and Van Doren's How to Read a Book will remember this.) This is not "critically" in the sense of looking for flaws, but critically in the sense of carefully, closely engaging with a text or play, with an understanding of what the performer is trying to do, and how their work fits in a bigger artistic tradition.

Live tweeting, it seems to me, is very hard to do critically, or hard to balance with the work of criticism. It olds great potential to be disruptive. It's difficult to split your attention between the event, and as Scheinin puts it, "swiftly crafting an impression of an event, touching the "send" button, and watching your tweet fly out into the big world." It would be incredibly hard to explain in real time, and in 140 characters, who Blanchard's version of "Autumn Leaves" comares with any of the hundred other great versions of that standard (I'm not a big jazz guy, but my iPhone has versions by Bill Evans, Wynton Marsalis, Eva Cassidy, and Edith Paif), to describe what Blanchard brings out in the song that others don't, or even to just note the interesting subtleties of the performance.

Now, you can get a sense of what it was like from "60s Miles treatment," but I'll bet there's a lot more one could say with more time-- with the sort of time you spend when writing a longer review, for example. Indeed, with the sort of time of take to write something like this:

Blanchard was in a Miles Davis-y mood -- playing lonely, piercing cries on the trumpet during "Nocturna," a moody ballad by Brazilian songwriter Ivan Lins.

"Wandering Wonder," a Blanchard original, started at a simmer and became a wild, Miles-y electric stew, with thick swirls of percolating patter from young drummer Justin Brown, who's from Oakland and now is a first-call player in New York; lush acoustic piano jabs and synth-keyboard scrambles from Fabian Almazan, who grew up in Havana, accompanied the piece. Blanchard, plugged in by a foot pedal, became many Blanchards, throwing clutches of high notes at the crowd.

So can you tweet and be a critic? In essence, can you incorporate those 140 characters into your focus on, and appreciation of, a performance?

Maybe, if you approach it as a form of note-taking, dashing off impressions of moments that you'll elaborate on later in greater detail. As a medium for expressing the excitement of a good performance, or noting something distinctive, Twitter could be useful. In this way, you stand a chance both of giving people who care a sense of the moment, and in so doing become more attuned to the moment yourself.

If you try to write a tiny review, though, you're going to fail: you don't have enough space, and the effort you spend trying to construct something pithy and witty will distract you from the performance.

Arguably, a great real time critic would give you a sense of what the experience of watching Terence Blanchard was like: not just cataloging the event, but choosing those few details and seconds that readers could use to reconstruct the event for themselves. This would be a different kind of demanding than traditional criticism, but the two aren't mutually exclusive: the later could build on the former.

Finally, you couldn't do it in an environment where it would cause a disturbance. At the concert, Blanchard

was battling an ever-stronger, 21st century connection: that between Silicon Valley concertgoers and their iPhones. Wow, were there ever a lot of people flipping through their email and Twitter accounts as Blanchard's quintet began its twilight performance.... a line of well-dressed young women moved through the eastern side of the park, shouting greetings to friends, trading hugs. You could see the response of the jazz hounds sprinkled through the audience: they clapped dutifully for Winston's solo, intent on maintaining protocol and buoying the band.

I this kind of environment, one more smartphone isn't going to make much of a difference. But try doing this in Carnegie Hall, or Yoshis.

A while ago I decided that I would not try to blog or tweet conferences or talks in real time, that I could be more useful writing longer reflections later (like this reflection on the d.compress show and this note on the Being Human conference). Lots of other people live tweet events, and my typing "Person X takes the stage #conference-tag" doesn't add as much as writing something more thoughtful later. It also lets me focus on my own notes, and listen more carefully.

So I think it's possible in theory to use twitter in an interesting critical way, in a manner that brings of more into the moment; but it would be very difficult, and require a kind of Zen archery level of effortless engagement with the medium that's hard to achieve.

I've been looking recently at meditation apps, and have been struck by a few things.

First of all, there are a LOT of them, many more than I expected. In the iTunes store you can find pages and pages of them.

Second, it's clear that the cost of developing them can be pretty low compared to some other kinds of software. The barriers to entry for producers is consequently pretty low.

Third, apps bring down the financial and logistical cost of experimenting with meditation practices. For the cost of a book, I can buy three or four different apps, each offering a different approach to meditation, and none of the requiring much of my time.

I was recently talking to Rohan Guntillake, creator of the excellent app Buddhify, and he pointed out that going to "a class at 6 pm for 8 weeks is a high investment, and it's not practical for many people." When he asked himself, "Can you lower the barrier?" he started thinking seriously about mobile apps, both because they're an existing platform, but also because they're present where people are most likely to need calm, or have a moment to practice. As he explains,

The thing that makes it [Buddhify] really work is that it's specifically for when you already listen to your headphones. The behavior change is very small. it's easier to get you to listen to Buddhify than Justin Bieber, than to get you to go to a class with incense and all that. It minimizes the behavior change on the user.

Update: I should add that I'm working on a magazine article on calming technologies, Zenware, and mediation apps, hence my interest. Watch this space for updates!

Little, Brown spent a lot of time on it, and I think they've managed to communicate a lot in a very small, challenging medium. They were also really good about explaining the design choices, making clear that they thought worked, and accommodating those changes I thought would improve it (or explaining why they would be hard to implement).

So the machine chugs along, and we get one step closer to having a finished book on the shelves!

A recent study by the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute found that

people who were texting while driving were 23 times more likely to crash or nearly crash than non-distracted drivers. They also found that drivers who were texting spent 4.6 out of every 6 seconds staring at something other than the road, meaning that if they were traveling at 55 mph, they could travel the length of a football field without looking at the street.

C. J. Chivers, author of a great book about the AK-47, is in Syria, and got this picture:

Machine gun in right hand. Cell phone in left. On duty on the gun-truck’s machine gun, at 80 miles an hour into Aleppo, checking messages along the way.

Even as the war in Syria rages, large areas of the countryside have cellular phone coverage, and the fighters are constantly checking their phones. When they stop, many of them immediately look for ways to recharge their phone batteries. And, often as they move and enter an area with a strong signal, they commence texting back and forth.

I've been listening to the BBC Reith Lectures while walking the dog, and this bit from Bertrand Russell's 1948 series on "Authority and the Individual" (mp3, or transcript) caught me this evening:

But as men grow more industrialised and regimented, the kind of delight that is common in children becomes impossible to adults because they are always thinking of the next thing and cannot let themselves be absorbed in the moment. This habit of thinking of the ‘next thing’ is more fatal to any kind of aesthetic excellence than any other habit of mind that can be imagined, and if art, in any important sense, is to survive it will not be by the foundation of solemn academies, but by recapturing the capacity for wholehearted joys and sorrows which prudence and foresight have all but destroyed. (emphasis added)

Naturally I latched onto it as an argument about the importance of maintaining a capacity for attention-- that ability to be "absorbed in the moment"-- but there's also resonance with both Csikszentmihalyi's work on flow and creativity, and with arguments about the downside of over-programming or over-managing innovation.

Anyway, the Reith Lectures are my new favorite thing. The old ones have those marvelously plummy (what a perfect word) announcers. You could write a whole book about the English language-- or a short, phenomenally successful one-- by tracking the accents and tenor of BBC announcers.

How do we reclaim a human handle on systems that increasingly demand we adapt to them? How do we learn to Occupy Technology?

Reconnecting.calm... suggests a way to re-think and so reintegrate science, technology and faith (in living lives of composure and compassion), not to engineer more ‘cool stuff’ or ‘smart weapons,’ but rather to engage in building a more just and civil society.

The point of the Sabbath since antiquity has been to shed the skin of complacency. To see, hear, feel the extra-ordinary-ness of the ordinary with renewed awe and vigor. For many now, the weekend is the time to shop after a physically and emotionally exhausting week. This isn’t healthy. We need to get our own signal-to-noise ratio in balance, to achieve composure enough that we can act compassionately to the people around us....

[So] turn off the appliances; stay away from stores, newspapers, TVs or anything with ads. Read a book, enjoy a massage, take a walk, look at photos from Hubble, eat a good meal, get reacquainted with the family and yourself. Shut off the digital and luxuriate in the analog. Don’t try to fit it in; fit the rest of the week around it.

The first decade of the 21st century, the so-called ‘naughties’, has brought profound changes to the technological foundations of the media landscape. The key buzzwords are networks, the Internet and social media. In the second decade, people will not search for new technologies allowing for even easier, faster and low-priced content production. Rather, appropriate reactions to this media revolution are to be developed and integrated politically, culturally and socially. The concept “Slow”, as in “Slow Food” and not as in “Slow Down”, is a key for this. Like “Slow Food”, Slow Media are not about fast consumption but about choosing the ingredients mindfully and preparing them in a concentrated manner. Slow Media are welcoming and hospitable. They like to share.

Like all manifestos, it consists of a bunch of points or recommendations, including some that strike me as really nice:

Slow media promote Monotasking. Slow Media cannot be consumed casually, but provoke the full concentration of their users. As with the production of a good meal, which demands the full attention of all senses by the cook and his guests, Slow Media can only be consumed with pleasure in focused alertness....

Slow Media respect their users. Slow Media approach their users in a self-conscious and amicable way and have a good idea about the complexity or irony their users can handle. Slow Media neither look down on their users nor approach them in a submissive way....

Slow Media are timeless. Slow Media are long-lived and appear fresh even after years or decades. They do not lose their quality over time but at best get some patina that can even enhance their value.

[I should preface this by confessing that 99% of what I know about the Tibetan Book of the Dead comes from the wild movie Enter the Void, a film that makes Melancholia or a Quentin Tarantino nonlinear crime caper look like an episode of M*A*S*H. So caveat emptor.]

I've spent the last day dealing with a dying computer. After about 24 hours of episodically working on it, I'm no closer to figuring out what's actually wrong with it, and whether it can be fixed.

This may be one of the most compelling reasons to have something like contemplative computing: being able to remain calm and reflective when your systems stop behaving the way they do in the ads, and start going haywire for mysterious, and perhaps unknowable reasons.

I've got an old 15" Macbook Pro, which I bought secondhand, and have upgraded a couple times. It's got more RAM and a 1 TB hard drive, and until recently was working pretty well. Recently, though, I've had some reasonably serious issues: programs freeze (often in a cascade where one freezes, then the next, and finally the Finder goes nuts), it takes forever for Time Machine to back up, and it has trouble going to sleep and shutting down. Most recently, the Finder has started crashing spontaneously, and presumably Mac-friendly programs like Safari have been crashing on startup. Clearly something pretty serious is going on here.

I first tried zapping the PRAM, resetting the battery, running Disk Utility, and doing all the other little obvious things you're always supposed to try first. (I also backed up all my important files, and my music and movies, to a hard drive.) Nothing.

I then reinstalled Mac OS X, rebuilding the whole system, but leaving the rest of my files untouched. The Finder still crashes.

I tried running a hardware test, but those no longer seem to work for my older Mac. And once you get into this kind of testing, the documentation starts getting wiggy, which introduces a NEW challenge into an already confusing situation. You're supposed to be able to put the hardware test on a jump drive and run it when you boot up your computer, but: 1) Apple changed the commands that guide booting up from utility disks or diagnostic tools in the latest release of OS X; 2) the hardware diagnostic tools can't be copied to jump drives; and 3) the new online diagnostic tools don't seem accessible to this Mac. The online documentation, however, never makes clear whether I ought to be able to get to those tools or not, and with several years' support documents, discussions, etc. online now, it's hard to know if the advice or manual you're reading is still relevant.

I've made an appointment for the Genius Bar for tomorrow afternoon, and we'll see if they can figure out what's going on. In the meantime, I'm trying one more time to make Time Machine work, but after half an hour, it's still "preparing backup." (There are various suggestions on different forums about to speed these up: files you can delete if you go into Terminal mode, functionalities you can turn off that mirror your desktop in case of a battery failure, Time Machine log files you can hunt down and kill off. Who knows if they work, or if they used to work but don't any more...) We shall see what happens.

Not long after Katherine Losse left her Silicon Valley career and moved to this West Texas town for its artsy vibe and crisp desert air, she decided to make friends the old-fashioned way, in person. So she went to her Facebook page and, with a series of keystrokes, shut it off...

She started working at Facebook in its early stage, then left a couple years ago to write a book. She had a pretty good view of things-- she worked directly under Mark Zuckerberg-- but eventually 'began comparing Facebook to the iconic 1976 Eagles song 'Hotel California,' with its haunting coda, 'You can check out anytime you want, but you can never leave.'"

She deleted her Facebook account after leaving, but eventually created another one. Her decision, I think, is a nice example of how we ought to approach these services: mindfully.

Rejecting it altogether felt, to her, extreme. But she approached it this time with a new wariness, not as a place to make and maintain friendships but one where a new author could cultivate a public image.

She carefully minded the privacy controls and signed on using a browser setting that limited the ability of Web sites to track her as she surfed the Internet. She prefers to carry out conversations on the phone, by e-mail or, when possible, in person.

Along the way Losse has found a point of balance, a mix of technological connection and disconnection that, for now, suits her.

“You can’t get away from it. It’s everything. It’s everywhere,” Losse said. “The moment we’re in now is about trying to deal with all this technology rather than rejecting it, because obviously we can’t reject it entirely. We can avoid one site or another, but we can’t leave our phones at home anymore.”

Via Jezebel, the Times of Israel reports on one of the more interesting examples of augmented reality I've seen in a while:

the Committee for Purity in the Camp offers a variety of gadgets to limit the field of view and so prevent men from exposure to over-exposed women. The devices have recently gone on sale in ultra-Orthodox neighborhoods of Jerusalem and elsewhere.

Two semi-transparent stickers applied to the lenses of the user’s spectacles blur vision of anything beyond the range of a few meters and so diffuse immodestly dressed women to a harmless blot.

If Google Goggles has an open API, perhaps the CPC can develop a plugin that can identify and block out women before their wearers perceive them.

These nicely raise a substantive issue: the degree to which we should outsource self-control to external devices. Jezebel argues, "Outsourcing that willpower to a pair of glasses makes the idea of self-control almost meaningless," but admits it's better than haranguing little girls wearing short sleeves.

On the other hand, you could argue that this isn't substantively different from having an alarm clock that wakes you up earlier than you would otherwise get up (a technology that I use pretty much every day), or carrying a notebook in which you can write down the grocery list. Yes, having the notebook keeps you from having to memorize all the ingredients you daughter needs for the cake she's going to bake; but it also reduces the odds that you'll forget something and be responsible for ruining that surprise party.

These days I tend to feel that technologies that augment or extend my own abilities are good, while technologies that automate are more questionable. I don't write down everything in my notebook, and thus absolve myself of the need to ever remember anything: it only extends my own capacity to recall lists. When you rely too much on technologies to either change you or alter the world to suit your preferences, you're likely to end up weakening, not strengthening, yourself.

Just came across an interview on CBC Spark with my former Microsoft Research colleague Abigail Sellen. She talks about lifelogging and what's wrong with the idea of total memory capture. You can download the mp3, or listen through the Web site.

Nora Young does a great job with technology interviews. I had a good time with her a couple years ago, talking about RFID.

A 30-year-old classic experiment that is often used to argue against free will might have been misinterpreted.

In the early 1980s, Benjamin Libet at the University of California in San Francisco, used electroencephalography (EEG) to record the brain activity of volunteers who had been told to make a spontaneous movement. With the help of a precise timer that the volunteers were asked to read at the moment they became aware of the urge to act, Libet found there was a 200 millisecond delay, on average, between this urge and the movement itself.

But the EEG recordings also revealed a signal that appeared in the brain even earlier – 550 milliseconds, on average – before the action. Called the readiness potential, this has been interpreted as a blow to free will, as it suggests that the brain prepares to act well before we are conscious of the urge to move.

This is one of those experiments that's made it into science fiction, gets regularly invoked in TED talks, and probably has made it into a David Brooks column. And now there's evidence that we've misunderstood the phenomenon:

"Libet argued that our brain has already decided to move well before we have a conscious intention to move," says [National Institute of Health and Medical Research scientist Aaron] Schurger. "We argue that what looks like a pre-conscious decision process may not in fact reflect a decision at all. It only looks that way because of the nature of spontaneous brain activity."

Schurger's group designed an experiment around the fact that

when we have to make a decision based on visual input, for example, assemblies of neurons start accumulating visual evidence in favour of the various possible outcomes. A decision is triggered when the evidence favouring one particular outcome becomes strong enough to tip its associated assembly of neurons across a threshold.

Schurger's team hypothesised that something similar happens in the brain during the Libet experiment. In this case, rather than make a spontaneous movement, subjects were told to act as soon as they heard a click. What they found was that the fastest responders were "those in whom the accumulation of neural noise had neared the threshold – something that would show up in their EEG as a readiness potential."

So what does this say about free will? "If we are correct, then the Libet experiment does not count as evidence against the possibility of conscious will," says Schurger.

With 24/7 media overstimulation coming at me from every corner of the planet, do I really need a jet to throw me off my sleep schedule? Trust me, you can forget what day it is even without a passport.

And why do we insist on blaming the flying itself? Sit me upright in an easy chair for 13 hours, replay the Bourne trilogy three times, ply me with gin-and-tonics and let me doze off with my chin tucked into my clavicle…. I’m pretty sure I’d wake up feeling weird without ever leaving my living room.

The main thing, though, is this: Tokyo is really far away from New York. Thousands-and-thousands-of-miles far away. Around-the-bend, other-side-of-the-world far away. And when I get there—when I finally arrive and somehow restlessly fumble my way out of Narita and into that big, overwhelming city—I experience the rush of displacement all over again.

As an April Fool's Day joke with a serious message, Philadelphia officials taped off an "e-lane" for distracted pedestrians on a sidewalk outside downtown office buildings.

Some didn't get that it was a joke.

"The sad part is we had people who, once they realized we were going to take the e-lane away, got mad because they thought it was really helpful to not have people get in their way while they were walking and texting," [deputy mayor Rina] Cutler said.

She added, "One of the messages will certainly be 'pick your head up'-- I want to say 'nitwit,' but I probably shouldn't call them names."

Though given that last year, a textestrian* fell off a subway platform in Philadelphia, maybe that wouldn't be a bad idea. However, this does appear to be turning into A Thing:

A University of Maryland study found 116 cases over six years in which pedestrians were killed or seriously injured while wearing headphones. In two-thirds of the cases the victims were men under age 30. Half the cases involved trains. In a third of the incidents, a warning horn was sounded just before the accident….

About 1,152 people were treated in hospital emergency rooms in the U.S. last year for injuries suffered while walking and using a cellphone or some other electronic device, according to the Consumer Product Safety Commission, which receives annual data from 100 emergency rooms and extrapolates the information into a national estimate. But that's likely an underestimate because patients may not mention they were using a cellphone or other device at the time at the time they were injured, or the doctor or nurse may neglect to include the information in their report, said Tom Schroeder, director of the commission's data systems.

The cases include a 24-year-old woman who walked into a telephone pole while texting; a 28-year-old man who was walking along a road when he fell into a ditch while talking on a cellphone; a 12-year-old boy who was looking at a video game when he was clipped by a pickup truck as he crossed the street; and a 53-year-old woman who fell off a curb while texting and lacerated her face.

*I officially propose "textestrians" as the term for texting pedestrians. You're welcome.